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Rough week, is it over yet?

Wow, I didn’t know a week could be so down. A relative died, a relative went into the hospital again (since January, it is in for a week out for a couple and back in), an immediate family member found out that the cancer has returned, and that was all in the span of three days.

I am still doing a lot of World Building in my head for the novel, so I thought I would take this week to highlight a blog that I follow.

Fantasy-Factionhttp://fantasy-faction.com
This blog was found when I was over at GoodReads looking through the book blogs ballot (needless to say, I picked up several blogs from this venture and will let you know which ones I continue to follow). Since it was about Fantasy fiction, I took a look and keep being impressed. The book reviews are thorough and give you both a nice teaser and the reviewer’s thoughts and why they came to the conclusions they did. The reviews were my reason for checking out the blog, but the articles keep me coming back. In fact, the comments have also been well written and thought out.

The articles center on writing and things that pertain specifically to Fantasy but include topics that all writers should pay attention. A recent article covered poisons, and when detailing the poison they gave specific examples of things that could occur in Fantasy (a poison tree that could kill a warrior if his bow was made from the wood). Each poison was also given a geographical location that it would be found in and a basic time period.

Another article discussed making characters that are non-white male. While this has usually meant including other races, this discussion went deeper by including disabilities. The best part of the article was the point in making disabilities a part of the character and not something that is pointed out for the reader to notice that the story is “politically correct.” I loved the way it showed the importance of not drawing attention to the problem every paragraph but working it in, such as a character with a scar doing subtle motions that are meant to hide a scar that can’t be hidden or the way that familiar characters never mention the disability because you wouldn’t go around mentioning their brown eyes all the time. Obviously, this article was dear to my heart because they made sure to point writers in a direction other than stereotyping or trying to be inclusive by pointing out how much they are including.

I am very impressed with the site and will continue to keep up with this blog.